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training in the snow

For those of you that train in the snow. How do you think the snow affects your training drills? (besides losing bumpers)

Just beginning wagon wheel drills with my dog and we now have about 6" of fresh snow on the ground. We have already done the 4 spoke wheel before the snow hit. But now just as we are ready to move into the 8 spoke drill but we got hit with snow. I dont want to develop and confidence issues or problems. Will the snow affect training wagon wheel drills??

I guess I "could" clear a large spot...but who wants to do that? Its a long winter.

How well trained is your dog in retrieving? If it is good at it, snow may add to the challenge. The hard part is for you to remember where you threw them so that you can point your dog in the right direction. Start with a smaller circle and try it out. If it is successful, go bigger...and bigger... and bigger. In the real world, every bird is not visible and this can be a great time to strengthen his confidence. Start small and grow based on your dogs performance.

Ishmael The Philosopher

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
― Henry David Thoreau

How about throwing marks in snow? Yesterday, there was no snow on the ground where I live, but I arrived at the training grounds to find a couple inches accumulation. Not deep enough to make a featureless white field, but enough for a mottled black and white landscape.

It's a long drive to the training area, so I perservered and set up the wingers. I didn't bother with hanging the white t-shirts that I'm using as stick men. They obviously weren't going to help. The plan was to work on falls in front of a visual wall, in this case, in front of a row of leafless aspens. I set her up way too far back (200 yards) and I'm pretty sure she didn't even see the dokken flying through the air against the background of aspen spires. Bad training set up. Next time, I moved much closer (100 yds) and tied flagging to the dokken legs. She saw that one but had to do a bit of quartering to sniff out the bird in the snow.

After that, I stuck with much shorter throws as stand-alones (where I could assist in bird finding) or very short winger throws. Still, snow requires a bit of quartering even when she goes directly to the AOL. Is that bad? Will it encourage a habit of beginning to quarter before she gets close to the bird? Is it better to suspend field training until most of the snow is gone?

Not training in the winter just isnt an option for us. That would mean several months off. Last winter wasnt a big issue as we werent doing anything too complicated. However I found that by adding a length of orange flagging ribbon onto the eye of bumper, it was a big help for finding bumpers in the snow.

Canvas bumpers are the way to go in winter the plastic ones get too hard but training in the snow is a blast especially for drills plow shovel or snow blow straight paths to the piles of bumpers your dog gains confidence like no other plus i think, they may run straighter in the spring as well

Justin E Schneider

Foundation's One Up the Sleeve
Foundation's Rolling Thunder

RIP Xtreme's 30 Rounds N' 1 Full Maggie SH

"Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail." -- Josh Billings

A good friend will always help you out, a dog treated right will never leave your side - ME